I’ve had Skype installed on my PC for ages, but never actually used it… nor any other webcam chat software. Previously that was mainly due to not having a webcam (a pretty good reason, I reckon!). I’ve had a crappy little cam for a while, and rarely used it – a couple of tests to see if it works, and using it for a live feed mixed in to the visuals using Neon v2 (okay, yes I mention that software a lot, and that is because it happens to be what I use). I’ve happened upon some rather interesting software which allows you to fubar about with your ‘webcam’ output – you can use still pictures, video clips, and even live capture of your desktop instead of the usual webcam picture. I realise this isn’t completely new, but this is a free program, so I downloaded it to give it a try — Broadcaster StudioPRO. It works fairly well, though it seems now that if I try to use the video capture in Neon without StudioPRO running I no longer get the webcam input.

I was really rather hoping to be able to use the live cam capture as a layer in Neon, then have the output window be my ‘cam’ output streamed to the net so I could mix myself into my visuals (and maybe make myself reasonably interesting to look at – ha!)
but sadly this is not to be. Neon does not allow you to select which camera to use, and it seems the ‘cam’ selected for you is the virtual one. I can still make it give the feed from the camera, but then the live camera goes to everything cam-related (importantly, the stream outbound to the net).

Still, I did manage to have Neon doing some live visuals mixing, and and have that captured by StudioPRO and sent to the net – not just to a webcam user, but broadcast (theoretically… only ever had one person look at it, so not too broad so far) – streamed to a webpage! Viewing the page myself while streaming out, and while my PC is crawling due to an excessive amount of things going on at once (Neon – a problem in itself!, Winamp or a CD playing for some audio, StudioPRO, the ‘Live’ web page/interface to send my stream, and another IE window to view the broadcast), shows a fairly poor framerate. I’m not sure what it’s like for someone at the other end when I’m not trying to stream it back to myself… Feel free to give me a holler and tee up a time to try it out.